Take me out to the 101001010 game!

A few weeks back I went to Safeco Field in Seattle to watch the Mariners.  (Baseball, for those still not sure)  The Mariners are owned by Nintendo, which has generated a few cool perks, like Ken Griffey Jr. getting his own line of badass baseball video games in the 1990s.  There could be WAY more neat stuff, like having to crawl through green tubes to get to your seat and having a DK Banana Split Shack but I guess they haven’t given into their creative impulses yet.

One really neat thing, though, is the DS network they have at the stadium.  All you do is bring your DS (or rent one for free there), stand next to one of the plentiful download stations for 30 seconds, and enjoy.

The aspect of it they try to sell is that you can order food from your seat.  It makes sense to show that ability off, since that’s all that really separates having the network from what any old iPhone can do.  But that’s not what interests me.  I can take the 30 seconds to walk to the hot dog stand rather than pay a 15% convenience fee.  The cool thing is the work that was put into the content you get from hooking your system up to the digital festivities.  There’s sortable statistics for every player in baseball, real-time pitch tracking (showing vertical and horizontal break, not just speed), box scores for every other game that day, ESPN articles and the requisite annoying fan forum.

Logging on feels like a nod back to the fans who actually take the sport seriously.  Live sports these days has become, understandably, a family affair that is geared toward keeping 9-year-olds entertained.  So that means instead of stats on the screen between innings you get videos of the Mariner Moose getting hit in the crotch by a pitching machine.  The fact that I can now go to the park and get all the stat-geek crap I could ever want, while the front office still can pander to Ma and Pa Casual Fan makes this a situation where everyone can be happy.  Except PSP users.  You’re still screwed.